1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for communicating with error checking to a device capable of operating according to an address prefix serial bus protocol.
2. Description of Related Art
The Inter-Integrated Circuit (‘I2C’) bus protocol is a well-known and widely-popular bus protocol for implementing data communications between computer devices. The I2C bus protocol is a serial computer bus protocol for connecting electronic components inside a computer that was first published in 1982 by Philips. I2C is a simple, low-bandwidth, short-distance protocol. Most available I2C devices operate at speeds up to 400 Kbps, although some I2C devices are capable of operating up at speeds up to 3.4 Mbps. Using I2C, multiple devices may easily be linked together since I2C has a built-in addressing scheme. Current versions of the I2C have a 10-bit addressing mode with the capacity to connect up to 1008 nodes.
Although the I2C bus protocol is well-known and widely-popular, the I2C bus protocol does have certain limitations. Because of the simple design of the I2C bus protocol and the original application of the protocol, the I2C protocol does not support error checking such as, for example, parity checking, cyclic redundancy checking, error-correcting codes, and so on. Implementing data communications connections using the I2C bus protocol, therefore, may lead to undiscovered errors being introduced into the data transmitted through an I2C data communications connection. Such undiscovered errors may cause a computer system to malfunction or produce incorrect results.